See, in Unicorn Overlord, there’s many characters you can spare or execute. UO attempts a moral quandary where you can put aside your moral apprehensions and spare absolutely awful people in order to recruit them, or just not kill them without them necessarily joining you.
“Attempts” is the key word here because while the gameplay is very fun, the writing of the game has all the charm of a stiff doorknob, it’s not a game I’d recommend if you want to get to know wonderful, innovative, and or charming characters per se.
Big preface coming:
A rare good example: There’s a pair of plague doctors who engaged in actual honest to god human experimentation of the cruelest most utilitarian kind, BUT it was ultimately, genuinely because that particular case was one where you really couldn’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. If that plague they were attempting to placate spread, it really was going to be a continent-wide pandemic. One of them dies, the other one pleads you to let her finish the research, because it’s almost done and it’ll make all the sacrifices worth it. This is good because you can put the bag on it to punish an objectively cruel and cold doc but potentially fuck over a lot of people by effectively cutting out the potential cure, OR let her finish up and thus validating all the incredibly cruel experiments she carried through but potentially saving a lot more people.
Now, contrast this with this one regional lord who was severely rationing food, and who was very much a massive asshole, but the guy had a point: Famines happened in this particular region, he survived one such famine as a kid, seeing many people die. The way the good guy that puts you against him describes, he’s starving people, but literally every other villager tells you “yeah we don’t eat much but we still are pretty ok and we’ve never actually been hungry because our larders are always full”, and this guy, who was very much just an asshole but completely right and not at all unreasonable, you have no way to spare him whatsoever.
That’s fine and all, but then you have our Main Course here:
There’s a dude early on who’s gleefully killing people and looting villages who you can fight. Upon defeat, he spins you a sad story about his sick, sick sister who needs an expensive medicine, asks you to spare him. You can’t execute him, just incarcerate him, which is odd and unique to him. If you do, predictably, he escapes.
Soon after, a guy is assaulting a church, pilfering all he can with hostages, makes sure he’d enjoy putting some arrows in some foreheads. You fight, beat him, and we have a story about his friend’s sick sister, you see, and this is to help pay for her medicine. You CAN execute him.
MUCH later, in elfland, the first guy is straight up, again, gleefully killing elves and kidnapping a lot of elven villagers, selling them to slavery and worse, you fight him, he says his sister is just so so sick that he has no choice but to traffic elves. You can forgive him again or execute him. Except if you pick to not forgive him, the piece of shit Gryphon Rider that joins you this map stops you and tells him to go to her family, they’ll provide him with a full on cure free of charge for her :) yippie! Hell, if you forgave him twice, he joins you and this is framed as a really cool thing. Fuck those elves that got trafficked already, by the way. Literally no recourse, justice, or anything. Game almost guilts you for not forgiving the guy that happily murders and traffics civilians because he has a sick sister. Cool.
So at least that’s over with, except another entirely different guy who in the early game was hunting witches (who are good in this setting) for profit and glory, and who you beat, has escaped to a late game area, in the beast folk country, and has ingratiated himself with the local beast folk community, while in the darkness, he’s kidnapping and trafficking beast folk civilians. You beat him and then he gets a whole cutscene about how hard he’s been trying to reverse his fortunes — despite always showing to enjoy himself a LOT while enslaving and trafficking beast folks — and how that’s admirable and he’ll Never Give Up. You get no choice to execute him whatsoever, again, a rarity, and he becomes a defender of the beast folk, no repentance whatsoever. The beast folks who git trafficked, by the way? Fuck them lmao, because the guy Never Gives Up. Oops!
The way Unicorn Overlord handles the complete inability to punish slavemongers and traffickers of life in stark contrast with the fates of literally everyone else is incredibly jarring and weird, down to the way it’s always framed as “awww but it’s for an admirable reason though!” whereas far nobler enemies, some of which are literally just fighting to defend their people, get put in the woodchipper or have the choice to get put in the woodchipper completely unceremoniously, which is so so weird when only, specifically the people traffickers are unkillable and glorified.
Attention, rare sightings of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork 🦩 🖤
“From the back, Vetinari looked like a carnivorous flamingo.” - Men at Arms
“Thin, pale, and clad all in dusty black, the Patrician always put Ridcully in mind of a predatory flamingo, if you could find a flamingo that was black and had the patience of a rock.” - Reaper Man
@elodieunderglass I know it s supposed to be the leucism channel, but COME ON
the clips i saw last night are already removed from tiktok (lol) but here’s the one i was talking abt. where elon is 1) listening to grimes while 2) dying on a tutorial of a game while 3) he’s trying to prove he’s a Gamer and 4) everyone in chat is bullying him lmao
sekiro is fun because it has the first souls protag with an established personality and backstory, which allows us to have the first souls protag whose life fucking sucks for reasons completely unrelated to living in a souls game. ashina is beautiful but sekiro lives in his own personal hell. yeah, the fact that he can die from being hit with shit from a butt launched by a giant ape is because hes a souls protag, but he also gets hit by his dad a lot too. he doesnt get yummy estus soup, he has to drink medicine that is explicitly stated to taste and smell bad, and the way he levels them up is by focusing on how shit it tastes and smells. worry not, tho! he can follow it up with delicious handfuls of loose, uncooked rice. he can speak for himself in non-plot essential conversations, which means the player doesnt even have to touch the controller for him to fumble a bad bitch! literally the first npc conversation you can overhear is people calling him pathetic. the game starts with him #girlrotting in a hole he could easily escape but doesnt care enough to do so. hes an orphan of war. his adoptive dad tried to kill him. truly he was born in a wet cardboard box all alone
this is the face of a man whose anti-poison swamp tech is ingesting a different poison. and yes, it is made of dead wasps. obviously.
Prep, prep, prep, and then do more prep. The more prep you do, the better you will be at improvising when, inevitably, something weird happens.
Bring a lot of energy to the table. As the GM you set the tone. If you’re excited and having fun, then your players will be too. But at the end of the day, you want your players to be the ones playing the game. For me, the most successful sessions were the ones where after 30 minutes I could mostly shut up and let my players carry the game where they wanted it to go.
Dole out information with care. Don’t be stingy, but don’t dump it on players all at once either. Usually, I find there’s a certain piece of information that will emerge organically that makes for a good twist or lynchpin. Make some pageantry of it.
ALT
